


untitled

by nahco3



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-29
Updated: 2011-08-29
Packaged: 2017-10-23 05:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/246851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nahco3/pseuds/nahco3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>David Villa makes a list.</p>
            </blockquote>





	untitled

**Author's Note:**

> this is my DV backstory.

The next day, David makes a list. It goes like this:

Winning. (underlined twice)

Loyalty.

Look what loyalty got Raul.

England seems nice.

Who the fuck am I kidding? I hate England.

Pepe.

Death by asphyxiation is preferable to seeing Luis every day.

If Wayne Rooney hugged me after I scored, I would be crushed.

So: Chelsea or Arsenal.

Not Chelsea. Fuck them.

I hate Cesc, too.

No wonder my therapist says I’m negative.

My therapist can die in a fucking fire.

(Later, in different ink)

My daughter.

My wife.

He remembers: pain. The sterile light of a hospital. Strange hands. Crying for his mother. The finality of the cast around his leg, smothering it.

Later, his mother will tell the story again and again, always with tears in her eyes. “They said, those doctors, that he would never run again. My David, he always ran. Everywhere. So I said, I said to them, you’ll see. God will provide. And He did.”

David would listen, half-embarrassed and half-pleased, muscles aching from laps around the pitch, cleats slung over his shoulder. Later, he would run his hand along the muscles of his thigh, and underneath feel where his bone healed, shard by shard, a slight bump the only evidence of this miracle.

When he was eight, his father bought him a ball, a heavy thing, bigger than his head. It smelled new, clean and leathery, but there were his father’s coal-stained finger prints marring it. He didn’t care. He ran with that ball at his feet, ran and no one could catch him.

He didn’t notice his mother’s arm: those same finger prints in dark purple and nauseating yellow.

The mine was everything then, everyone’s father disappeared down its hungry shaft, into a coal-dust night. They reemerged at sunset, blacked themselves, tired and broken.

There was an accident, someone’s father who went down and never came out, and for a day, the mine closed. David’s father sat in the sun and watched him play, watched him run, under the endless sky of youth, watched him with coal pit eyes.

The walls are thin, and that night David hears: a hard slap. “You can’t coddle him forever.” “What good is football? Will it feed his family?”

That night, David is afraid that the dark will swallow him up, that he will become coal stained and old, that glory will pass him by, that his back will grow crooked, like a plant without sun.

David grows up fast. Play better (better than anyone) and harder. Runs, scores, passes, escapes. Stadium lights, tireless, punishing sun, filtered moonlight, he plays under any sky. The earth never swallows him up, he is too alive to be entombed under a thousand years of soil.

The week after, David makes another list. It goes like this:

Talk to Mom about equitable assets.

Specialist in Madrid is Atletico fan. Torres jersey – wtf? Clearly, his judgment is impaired. Fire him.

Research girls’ football leagues.

Buy flowers.

Joaquin – prolonged torture inappropriate?

Find a new therapist.

(And, a pencil afterthought)

Dad’s chemo starts Monday.


End file.
